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Title: Portraits from the Desert : Bill Wright's Big Bend by Bill Wright ISBN: 0-292-79115-1 Publisher: Univ of Texas Press Pub. Date: 1998 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $40.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (5 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: West Texas as it really is
Comment: Photographer and writer Bill Wright comes from the West Texas town of Abilene: roughly eight hours drive at a steady seventy from his beloved Big Bend National Park. In Texas that, along with the fact that he's been visiting the park since childhood, pretty much makes him a local.

Texas has a considerable modern history, quite apart from it's more ancient nomadic inhabitants, and Wright maintains a consciousness of this in his travels through these southern borderlands of the USA. Passport controls do indeed exist at the border bridges into Mexico, along with stern warnings that it is illegal for Texans to carry guns into the neighbouring country, but the border patrols continue for nearly sixty miles across the desert into the USA with major checkpoints ocurring at the towns of Marfa and Marathon. The area South of these checkpoints, where Wright's portraits were made, are known as The Badlands and have been for the past 150 years.

Put simply Wright has an abundance of curiosity, the essential requirement of the documentary photographer; and a considerable degree of patience in the fact that he only really began making this book after a lifetime of visits. Be he visiting with the photographer Etta Koch, writing about "Crazy" Angie, who apparently isn't and operates the theatre at Terlingua Ghost Town, or photographing the rancher Buck Newsome, the white hat line on whose forehead clearly explaining how his life has been spent, Wright, while mentioning the people he was with and the details of the trip, never puts himself over the people or places he introduces to his readers. The border in West Texas might be described as permeable, with several unguarded but regularly used fords exisiting along the river. One such ford exists at a place called Lajitas, today a resort town bought lock stock and barrel by a billionaire and now boasting "the world's only international golf course", but Bill Wright digs deeper under the surface harking back to the time when the ford was an important crossing on the trail from Mexico city to the Spanish province of Nueva Viscaya. He remarks upon the "politically constructed" nature of the border between the States and their Southern neighbour, and the fact that locals continue to move freely across the Rio Grande even to this day. In an aside his thoughts wander to the realisation that where in the past Texas Rangers patrolled these areas, to keep international cattle rustling to a minimum, today the trade is reversed and the border patrols and enforcement agencies are more concerned with preventing the importation of illegal drugs. But for the local populace life continues much the same and Spanish remains the predominant language.

In many ways the story as a whole is about Wright and his experiences, but more about the manner in which the place molded him over the years than any form of personal recollection. For Texas is very much about the land. He has been absolutely true to his subjects and in this book he presents that very rare sort of travelogue that will be enjoyed by visitors, people who only ever visit far flung lands from the comfort of their own living rooms, and especially the residents of the Big Bend itself; who will understand.

Rating: 5
Summary: A book rarity, superb photographs joined to a stylish text.
Comment: This fine book will give the reader a good look and feel for the Big Bend of Texas.

Rating: 5
Summary: Awesome place, beautiful book.........
Comment: Although I am a native Texan, I have never visited Big Bend. Through the author's experiences with the people he met along the way, Big Bend has become more than the awesome pictures. I'm planning a trip. Bill Wright is a wonderful writer as well as photographer - I hope there are more books to come. Sounds as if he has travelled the world.